J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (19 page)

Unknown to Hoover, Donovan’s dreams were far more grandiose. As John Lord O’Brian confided to a friend, “Bill has a driving ambition. He won’t be satisfied until he’s the first Catholic President of the United States.”
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Their disparate backgrounds and Donovan’s political ambitions were not problems. All this Hoover could have handled, had not his new superior possessed certain other attributes.

Donovan quickly showed every sign of being an “empire builder,” a trait which Hoover hated in others.

He was, as even his latter-day biographers and OSS colleagues Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden freely admitted, “not a first rate administrator.” Another associate and friend, Stanley Lovell, put it even more bluntly: “all who knew him and worked under him recognized that Donovan was the worst organizer of all.”
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But far worse, from Hoover’s point of view, Donovan was a dilettante—a meddler and dabbler who liked to keep his hand in everything. And that, of course, included the Bureau of Investigation.

Suddenly, after spending months restructuring the chain of command and establishing a semblance of discipline, Hoover would find one of his orders countermanded, a procedure revised, or a disciplinary action upset—often with neither prior consultation nor even an after-the-fact explanation.

He reacted predictably. Both by memo and in person, Hoover strongly protested such intrusions, claiming they undermined his authority and interfered with the Bureau’s operations.

But, more often than not, his memos went unanswered. And before long, whenever Hoover attempted to protest directly, Donovan was too busy to see him, passing these “Hoover matters” on to whichever assistant happened to be at hand. On one occasion (which still rankled decades later) the acting director took what he considered to be a very serious grievance—Donovan’s “borrowing” of several of his agents for one of his own pet projects—to the assistant AG’s office, only to have a gum-chewing subaltern laconically respond, “I guess the Colonel had another of his whims.” If Hoover exaggerated the seriousness of such incidents, Donovan for his part greatly underestimated their importance to Hoover.

From the start, Donovan badly misjudged his Bureau chief. He considered Hoover a civil servant, and a “temporary” at that, without connections or power. He often referred to him slightingly as a “detail man,” meaning he lacked imagination and the broad view. That Hoover’s superb grasp and use of detail was not a weakness but one of his greatest strengths was a concept so foreign to Donovan’s own nature that he failed to even consider it. Missing this, he also missed the sustained, concentrated attention Hoover could focus on that single, telling detail.

At another time or under other circumstances, Hoover would probably have simply bypassed Donovan, making “end runs” to the attorney general. But knowing that Donovan was one of Stone’s favorites and that he was himself still in effect on trial, Hoover risked end runs rarely. Instead he was forced to suppress his anger.

Not until many years later—when their battles were fought on a global scale, and William J. Donovan’s greatest dreams were, one after another, denied him—did he understand what an associate meant when he referred to J. Edgar Hoover’s “terrible patience.”

Donovan himself was a master of gamesmanship, and although he failed to appreciate the duration and intensity of Hoover’s hatred, it took him no time at all to spot some of his tricks.

“Hoover would memo you to death,” a later AG, Ramsey Clark, recalled. “An attorney general could have spent literally all his time preparing memos back to the director.” On any given day, Hoover might send a stack of fifty memos to the AG’s office, forty-nine of which dealt with routine matters. “But unless you read each, line by line, you could miss the paragraph in that one which was really important.”
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And thereafter, if he was ever challenged, Hoover would be able to respond, I informed you of that, on such and such a date.

Donovan soon learned to retaliate, if not in quantity, in kind.

As early as June 10, 1924, Stone had requested a review of the applicability of federal criminal statutes to Communist activities in the United States. Although the attorney general, busy attempting to reform the entire Justice Department, had apparently forgotten the request, Donovan, noticing that Hoover hadn’t replied, pressed him on it until he was forced to respond with a memorandum he would long regret.

Dated October 18, 1924, and directed to William J. Donovan, assistant attorney general, Criminal Division, from J. Edgar Hoover, acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, its key paragraph read:

“It is, of course, to be remembered that the activities of the Communists and other ultra radicals have not up to the present time constituted a violation of the Federal statutes, and consequently, the Department of Justice, theoretically, has no right to investigate such activities as there has been no violation of Federal laws.”
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Despite the qualifying phrases, Hoover had been forced to admit, on paper, that most of his actions as head of the GID had been illegal. However, having served under both Palmer and Daugherty, and being himself somewhat expert on the subject, Hoover was well aware that anything put into a file could later be removed from it.

But by this time Donovan had apparently begun to reevaluate his initial impressions of Hoover, for he did exactly what he presumed (and rightly) the acting director was doing. He began keeping his own file on J. Edgar Hoover.

When the attorney general told him he was considering appointing Hoover permanent director of the Bureau, Donovan not only opposed the appointment; he went one step further: he urged Stone to fire him.

As if Hoover didn’t have enough problems, the ghost of the Palmer raids rematerialized, this time in the form of still another ACLU pamphlet, entitled
The Nation-Wide Spy System Centering in the Department of Justice.

The simplest way to deal with the pamphlet would have been to ignore it. But Hoover didn’t have that option. Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, had sent a copy to the attorney general. Stone, in turn,
had routed it to Hoover with the notation “Please comment.”

The pamphlet went well beyond the Palmer era, including numerous new charges, among them that BI agents had aided local police in the violent 1923 May Day raids; that Burns had used his position, and BI agents, to promote his own detective agency; and that the Department of Justice had supplied a blacklist of suspected radicals to various employers and manufacturers.

All this was true. It could also be laid on Burns.

What most concerned Hoover was neither this nor the by now standard charges of wiretapping, bugging, mail opening, and burglary, but the pamphlet’s very strong attack on the Bureau’s files: their collection, retention, and dissemination. The ACLU also alleged that in addition to the many dossiers, the BI maintained a master index of “several hundred thousand” persons branded as “supporters” of radical causes. Denial wasn’t easy, since Burns had proudly claimed the existence of the master index and dossiers during his final appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee.

Two other things must have bothered Hoover. One was the timing of this criticism, coming as it did while he was still trying to convince Stone that he was the right man for the job. The other was its source. For not only did Roger Baldwin and Harlan Fiske Stone share many of the same liberal views; they were also close friends.
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Hoover responded to Stone’s request with a seven-page rebuttal, in which he denied many of the charges (the BI “has no apparatus for the tapping of telephone wires,” Hoover said, knowing full well this wasn’t true); blamed the others on Burns and Flynn; justified the retention of the indices and files as necessary support to other agencies (for example, the screening of passport applications for the State Department); and blasted the ACLU for such irresponsible acts as providing legal aid to the IWW.

Nor could Hoover resist mentioning, though he did it most carefully, that the man who made these charges, Roger Baldwin, was an ex-convict.

Stone responded to both Baldwin and Hoover with the same suggestion: Why don’t you two get together and talk things out?
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Roger Baldwin was more than willing. In fact he looked forward to the meeting with a certain amount of relish. Although he had never met Mr. Hoover, he had a more than passing acquaintance with the Bureau of Investigation. On August 31, 1918, BI agents, aided by a group of patriots known as the Propaganda League, had raided the New York office of the pacifist National Civil Liberties Bureau, seizing its records and arresting, among others, its founder, Roger Baldwin.
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While Baldwin was in jail he had a surprise visitor. The BI agent Rayme Finch, who had led the August raid, had an embarrassing request. The Propaganda League boys had so messed up the NCLB records that he could make no sense of them. Would Baldwin help straighten them out?

Convinced the records would prove that his group had not counseled draft resistance, as charged, Baldwin agreed. Each morning, for the next month, an agent would check Baldwin out of the Tombs and take him to the Bureau offices at 15 Park Row, where he’d work on the records. For his part, Rayme Finch proved a good host. At mealtimes he insisted on taking Baldwin to the better restaurants. Once, to break up the monotony, he even treated him to a burlesque show. And, for hours on end, he regaled him with tales of his exciting adventures as an agent.

Baldwin later recalled, “With great pride, he showed me his telephonetapping equipment and asked if I wanted to listen in on any conversation; he’d put on anyone I named. I declined. He also showed me a whole setup for forming an IWW local—forms, membership cards, literature. Thus the [BI] would catch the ‘criminals’ they made.”

In going through the files, Baldwin discovered that a Bureau document had been inserted by error: it was headed ROGER BALDWIN—IWW AGITATOR. “I handed it to Finch without comment,” Baldwin recalled. “He looked a bit embarrassed for the first time and said, ‘We have to make it strong even if it isn’t right.’”
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Although the BI charges were dropped, Baldwin, himself a conscientious objector, was convicted of draft evasion, and served nine months in prison. Now he was looking forward to meeting Mr. Hoover. He had more than a few questions for Mr. Burns’s successor.

Hoover, by contrast, prepared for the meeting in the Justice Department’s law library, researching the statutes concerning the retention and destruction of federal records.

J. Edgar Hoover (George Washington University Law School ’16) and Roger Baldwin (Harvard ’05, Caldwell penitentiary ’19) met on August 7, 1924. Although the attorney general sat in, he let the Bureau’s acting director do most of the talking.

Young Mr. Hoover, Baldwin was pleased to observe, was not at all like Mr. Burns. Polite, and very lawyerlike, Hoover quickly assured Baldwin that he had played an “unwilling part” in the activities of Palmer, Daugherty, and Burns, claiming that while he regretted their tactics, he had not been in a position to do anything about them. Speaking rapidly, he snapped off, item by item, the attorney general’s new guidelines, explaining exactly what he had already done to implement each. The General Intelligence or Anti-Radical Division was being disbanded; the infiltration of labor unions and political
groups was a thing of the past, as was Bureau involvement in state and local syndicalism cases; the private detectives and dollar-a-year men were out, their replacements law school graduates, carefully selected, specially trained. His sole concern, Hoover told Baldwin, was helping the attorney general build an efficient law enforcement agency.

Although it was more recitation than dialogue, Baldwin was impressed. Hoover marked a welcome change from Burns and Flynn. Also, Harlan Stone trusted him, and he trusted Harlan Stone.

Baldwin left the meeting feeling he had won several victories. Most important, of course, was the dismantling of the GID. Hoover had assured him there was not a single man in the department now assigned to investigate radicals.

Hoover, for his part,
knew
he’d won a victory. And a very great one. Backed by his research, the attorney general had told Baldwin that without an act of Congress he lacked the authority to destroy the master index and personal files compiled by his predecessors. All he could do, Stone said, was promise Baldwin that as long as he was attorney general they would not be misused.

Hoover had won the right to keep the files. Decades passed before that right was again even feebly challenged.

Baldwin and Hoover met again on October 17, this time without Stone. At their earlier meeting Hoover had urged Baldwin to contact him “personally” if ever there were allegations of wrongdoing on the part of any of his agents. In return, Hoover promised a thorough investigation and, if the evidence warranted it, stern corrective action.

Baldwin arrived prepared to hold him to that promise, with a list of specific allegations. To each Hoover also answered with specifics: this arrest was made by the Secret Service, not the Bureau; these were postal inspectors; obviously this man was impersonating a federal agent—we’ll investigate.

Like many others, Baldwin was impressed with Hoover’s administrative ability. When he didn’t have the facts at hand, he quickly obtained them from an aide. But more often than not, each case, no matter how detailed, was already filed away in his amazingly retentive memory. Even more important, Hoover seemed quite sincere in his assertion that the Justice Department had entered a new era.

Indeed, in his enthusiasm he seemed to be offering nothing less than a partnership: the Bureau of Investigation and the American Civil Liberties Union working together to protect the rights of all citizens.
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The new Bureau had a single mandate, Hoover told Baldwin: to investigate alleged violations of federal law. No longer would it concern itself with personal opinions or beliefs.